Chris Huhne's ex-wife, Vicky Pryce, is "one of the most powerful, talented, intelligent and trusted women in the country" who wishes a jury to think she took his speeding points because "she had no real choice", a court has heard.

Summing up the prosecution case, Andrew Edis QC asked the jury to "look at who you are trying" when deciding whether Pryce had had her "will overborne" by her then husband when she signed a form taking his points.

"Do you really think there's any prospect of this woman having been reduced to such a quivering jelly that when she sent the form she thought she had no choices? Is she the quivering jelly kind? Or is she the kind of person to stand her ground to make her own choices? Yes she is," said Edis.

Pryce, 60, an economist, has denied perverting the course of justice by taking Huhne's speeding points when he was an MEP in 2003. Huhne, 58, has admitted a similar charge and is awaiting sentence.

Edis said Pryce's "special defence" of marital coercion was available only to wives who had been pressured by their husbands.

The prosecution "can prove that Vicky Pryce took those points because she chose to do so", Edis said. "She had a real choice and she exercised it in the way that she did."

He added: "Who are you trying? You are trying Professor Vicky Pryce, a person who is used to making important decisions." She had founded a company to give ethical advice to businesses, advice to people "so that they would try to do the right thing even when the wrong thing may be the easier thing to do", he said.

"We are not talking about a woman who is under the thumb to anyone. We are talking about someone who has had a brilliant career because throughout it she has made very good decisions," Edis said.

"Such a person may commit a crime because she thinks it would never be discovered and it's an easier way. But to describe such a person as having been deprived of real choice is to stop living in the real world. If she can't choose what she's doing, who on Earth can?

"In the real world when somebody gets a letter and fills it in and sends it back to the police, they do so because that's what they have chosen to do."

Edis said Pryce was keen to cast all the blame on Huhne, 58, "because of the way he treated her in 2010 when an affair he was having became public in the newspapers. She has never got over that, even to this day."

The jury could "understand anger, distress, betrayal and desire for revenge. This is all quite normal. Whether you would still be to that extent in the grip of it three years later, is another thing," he said.

"Putting all the blame on him has the function of getting revenge but it has another function. It means she can get her revenge and it's a free ride," he said. "She brings him down and protects herself, ultimately." That, he said, had been her plan ever since she first approached the Mail on Sunday in November 2010.

Why did this matter, asked Edis. "Well it matters and it matters greatly, I am going to suggest, because of the way that Vicky Pryce has chosen to present herself to you."

He said Pryce had "peddled a false story" that one of Huhne's constituency aides had taken his points, which was untrue. It was a story "designed to damage Mr Huhne". Edis said: "She denies this, but that's absurd."